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April 1, 2008

Arming nomads

A few pages into Michael Asher's book Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure and I found this about the British Empire hero Charles George Gordon:

As governor-general [of Sudan], he declared war on the slave trade. He closed slave markets, halted caravans and had slave-merchants publicly hanged. When the slave-traders in the Bahr-al-Ghazal region revolted, he unleashed the cattle-nomads of the steppes against them.

Sound familiar? A central power in Khartoum arms nomad militias to fight a proxy war in a remote region of Sudan.

Just remember the Brits did it first. (We also invented the concentration camp during the Boer War in South Africa. Makes you proud.)

Posted by aheavens at April 1, 2008 11:02 AM